If you connect with a company via social media, it’s likely to be someone in Marketing, or Customer Service. It might be an evangelist, or a community manager, or even the CEO. But when you then reach out to that company to explore some kind of business relationship–i.e., you want to spend money with them–you then don’t speak with that person. You speak with someone in sales–and all too often they don’t have the context, the connection or the relationship. These interactions are rarely as satisfying. This, it seems to me, highlights two important issues:
1. Social Media engagement shouldn’t be constrained to any one departmental silo.
and
2. Your company is probably not ready for #1.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
concur 100%. Social media engagement is a strategic issue, which makes it a leadership issue. Unless leaders engage, they won’t even know what to tell their sales and marketing folks about what it means to engage. The will have to settle for letting their sales and marketing folks tell them what it means to engage, and that is a bad strategy.
It’s a culture issue.
Social media is challenging the conventional relationship between the company and the customers. It is not a single department issue nor is it s leadership issue, it is a community issue. The company needs to recognize that it is an actor engaging in a communal discussion, therefore the traditional business roles are removed and all members of the company are part of the engagement. This means that everyone should be on the same page of the discussions so that when business is transacted the buyer does not feel like they are being “handed-off”.
That’s exactly what I was getting at, Erroin. This past week I’ve had pitches from a few social media agencies and solution providers. A couple of them were from the folks I had been engaging with already, and those met my expectations. But the rest were handoffs, and they ranged from oblivious to hamfisted. I don’t have the energy to restart all of those conversations from scratch–and I put very, very little of the onus here on the individual salespeople. As Jeffrey correctly says, it’s a culture issue.
Thanks!